By PAULA NECHAK, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 19, 2006

If you can forgive some woeful casting and a plot that is as creakingly thin as an old staircase, you can enjoy director Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige."

Nolan rolls many of the same visual and style elements that were fascinating and fresh in his "Memento" and "Batman Begins" into a Victorian-age, London-set mind chase, in which two rival magicians play out a Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty mystery in a "search for answers" to an illusion called "The Transported Man."

This dark obsession will force the secretive, talented Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and his nemesis, the less talented but consummate showman Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), to forsake all and face grave loss and death by upping the stakes on each other in a craftily designed plan to expose the machinations of the greatest illusion of all time.

This is all narrated by trusty old conjurer Cutter (Michael Caine), who explains the three acts that create a successful magic trick: the Pledge, in which the magician shows us something ordinary; the second act, the Turn, in which the ordinary is made to do something extraordinary, and the Prestige, the final act, with all the twists and turns and in which we see something shocking that we have never seen before.

Nolan follows the magician's tenet, taking us on extraordinary flights of fancy -- there's the secret research lab of radical inventor Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) set in the wintry wilderness of a burgeoning Colorado Springs; there are Thomas Edison's goons cagily eyeing the scientist's work with electricity, and there are the women -- the pawns who fall in the wake of Borden and Angier's relentless hunt and chase.

Three-quarters of the way through there is a scene that reveals the answer to the mystery. But Nolan spins it -- just as a magician would -- and the film, after two hours of redundant one-upmanship and effects that are pulled straight from a James Whale movie, finds its feet -- too late -- in a magestic finale.

"The Prestige" shares some similarities to the summer's surprise hit, "The Illusionist," but it's less a romantic revenge quest and more an ego match between two very different men who covet what the other has. Its greatest flaw is its lack of passion -- or compassion. Still Caine and the very focused and intense Bale bring some satisfaction to a visually majestic fantasia that is more slight than sleight-of-hand.